LIVE GAME PLAYER

We will perhaps have a game right here every once in a while, with this being more likely for the playoffs than in the regular season. The purpose of this site, however, is to help everyone keep up with the constantly changing sources of streams and recordings of NBA games, NOT to actually have them here.

WELCOME TO HOOPZ-1, THE INTERNET DIRECTORY TO BASKETBALL STREAMS

ABOUT HOOPZ-1
HOOPZ-1 IS YOUR 24-7 SOURCE FOR LINKS TO WEBSITES THAT HAVE OR LEAD TO LINKS TO LIVE GAME STREAMS, AND THAT HAVE OR LEAD TO LINKS TO DOWNLOADS TO VIDEOS OF COMPLETED GAMES
As the economy melts down, and the depression settles in, we want to share a little of the magic of the internet and provide some basketball fans and players with links to streams of games at no additional charge beyond what they have already paid for their computer, their internet connection, their electricity, their rent, their mortgage, and so forth, At one time, believe it or not, all television was free in the United States, and the networks were satisfied with the huge amounts of money they got from advertisers. But now the greed of huge corporations is off the charts, and there isn't enough free television any more.

Hoopz-1 does not mess around with anything less than links to sites that have full, complete games, so this is a site for serious basketball fans and players only. Mixtapes and outtakes are a dime a dozen, but if you are serious about basketball, you need to watch a whole game or at least a half of a game from time to time, especially playoff games, which we give top priority to.

We are the solution to at least 5 problems:
(1) We link to every obscure and hard to find diamond in the rough website that we can find that offers streams of live games and links for downloads of completed games. We are always on the lookout for new sites, because we know that the sites we have found sometimes have the goods and sometimes don't. And the sites themselves will come and go.

(2) We keep up with the constant changes in the sites where you can watch games, including sites disappearing completely

(3)Because the situation changes literally from week to week, Hoopz-1 will not have the time to post instructions on how to use every site or program, and nor will we have time to very often give detailed descriptions on what each site offers. However, we will as time permits give you instructions on how to use certain extremely important sites and programs. And we will by listing the sites in rank order, based on our opinion of which are the most important and best sites and programs.

(4) We provide you with access to more than one stream choice for many games, meaning that you can choose a different stream if one is stopping and starting too much, or if one is not a sharp enough picture. And streams sometimes simply stop right during the game! So for numerous reasons, you need Hoopz-1 to make sure you have a backup in case your original game watching plans turn to mush.

(5) We have NBA scores, schedule and standings widgets so that you don't have to go elsewhere to see what games are on tap and what the latest scores are.

THE BAD NEWS: WHY YOU REALLY, REALLY NEED THE RESOURCES HERE AT HOOPZ-1

Forget about reliability. Sometimes links to games work and sometimes they don't. There is no quality control and no one is responsible if a stream does not work well or does not work at all. Very few streams are high quality. A small majority of streams are good quality, the rest are not so good to terrible quality

Many of the web addresses where streams play appear and disappear almost overnight.

And the situation is worse still. The two most annoying things of all about trying to watch basketball games would be:

(1) Rather often a game simply stops playing during the game. This will often be in the 1st half, but can also happen in the 2nd half, and even in the 4th quarter. Obviously, this is a huge frustration, especially if you don't have a backup to watch the rest of the game with.

(2) The number of programs and browser plug-ins you are asked to download can make your head spin. Every year, there seems to be at least a couple of new "program flavors of the moment" which are supposedly necessary to watch games. But then if you download one or more programs you never had before, you often find

(a) they don't work right in the first place and/or

(b) they are partially or even completely abandoned long before the season is over and/or

(c) the number of games available on that particular program turns out to be very small

Hoopz-1 recommends that you limit yourself to three programs on a computer. Hoopz-1 currently recommends sopcast, tvants, and veetle. Other programs are generally less needed and in any event we can not assure you that other programs do not import some kind of spyware onto your computer, whereas we are reasonably certain that sopcast, tvants, and veetle do not import anything bad onto your computer.
THE BEST SOURCES OF LIVE GAME STREAMS RANKED FROM THE VERY BEST TO THE GOOD

This list includes many different types of sources of live basketball game streams. In some but not all cases, a program is needed to view the streams. The rank order is according to our best estimation of how useful each site is. New sources are considered unreliable until proven and so are not listed. True reliability, as discussed in the introduction, is not available anywhere, but in general, the following listing is from greter reliability to lower reliability.

(1) >>> Popular European origin forum where members post the links to basketball game streams that they have discovered before and during the game. This site is especially useful if during a game your stream goes bad or dead. No forum registration is required to obtain the links to streams.

(2) >>> An important page from the popular European origin forum that indexes links to streams to games that require an application to be downloaded. No forum registration is required,

(3) >>> Great source of live NBA games that originated from France

(4) >>> NEW as of Nov. 2009: will be removed if it is not reliable > an important new source of live NBA games and more

(5) >>> A site originated from China that links to streams of games, both click and play and program required streams.

(6) >>> A Spanish origin site that has a very comprehensive list of links to streams of all kinds of sports including basketball. Some are click and play but many require the download of a program.

(7) >>> Justin TV: Live basketball games on various channels at a social live video hosting site

(8) >>> Channel Surfing.net: This site has been around awhile, and the reliability has varied substantially from time to time. In the last year, the reliability of the stream links has been on the low side. If you get lucky though, you can watch a game simply by clicking a link here. For awhile, links were defaulting to audio broadcasts, but this seems to have ended for 2009-10.

LESS IMPORTANT AND LIMITED SOURCES

(9) >>> Binary Basketball NBA Live Streams Forum has links to streams. This forum does NOT offer links to all games, but you do NOT have to register or log in to get the links.

(10) >>> All Sports Nation Forum: has links to streams. This forum is pretty low traffic so far and may be difficult to use, because registration is and a certain amount of posting may be required to gain access to the links.

(11) >>> ESPN 360: Your broadband internet service may possibly include this, which appears to allow you to watch most or all of the NBA games that ESPN TV shows.

AUDIO ONLY LINKS:
(1) >>> NBA.com allows you to listen to radio broadcasts of live games for free, but you have to have an "NBA Insider" registration and you have to log in with it. Although NBA Insider is free, the log-in sometimes does not work correctly, which delays your being able to listen to the game. Furthermore, sometimes the link to the radio broadcast simply does not work, so you can not listen to the game even after you log in. All that said, this is usually a place to go if you simply can't watch the game and have to settle for listening to the game.

INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO TO LISTEN TO A GAME AT NBA.COM
(1) Click the above link.
(2) Log-in, or if necessary, register and log in as an NBA Insider at NBA.com. Both registering and logging in can be started by clicking NBA Audio League Pass > Listen Now and following the prompts to register and /or to log-in.
(3) When you are logged in, click "Listen Now" under NBA Audio League Pass
(4) Click on a live broadcast link. For some games, the broadcast of both teams (of that same game) are available.

The above lists will be checked often and updated as necessary. Completely unreliable sites and shut down sites will be romoved promptly.

Note that for convenience the above listings appear in both columns of Hoopz-1.

RECOMMENDED PROGRAMS FOR WATCHING LIVE STREAMS AND ALREADY PLAYED GAMES

PROGRAMS THAT ALLOW YOU TO WATCH MORE GAMES
When you visit some of the sites above, you may encounter the following programs. If you download and install one or more of these programs, you will have a greater chance of seeing the games you want to see with the quality you want to have. The following is a list of the most tested, reliable, and recommended programs that are useful in watching games.

VLC MEDIA PLAYER
Get VLC Media Player Here
This is a more flexible media player than Windows Media Player or Real Player. It is very useful when used in conjunction with a live Sopcast basketball stream. See the special section on Hoopz-1 explaining how to boost the quality of a sopcast stream with VLC. There may be other programs whose stream quality can be boosted with VLC media player. Furthermore, there are movie files that no media player other than VLC will play for one reason or another. The usefullness of VLC extends beyond basketball streams. All in all, this is highly recommended.

SOPCAST BROADCASTS
Get Sopcast Here
Sopcast is Chinese broadcasting software that has been around a while. There are a very large number of channels with all kinds of content. Quality varies from impossible watch to almost like watching television. The majority of NBA games have been on Sopcast lately, but the quality often is poor. If you play a poor Sopcast stream in a VLC media player, the quality improves dramatically. Many impossible to watch Sopcast streams of NBA games become possible to watch if they are simultaneously streamed in a VLC media player. There are instructions below for how to improve bad Sopcast streams by playing them in a VLC media player.

TVANTS BROADCASTS
Get TVANTS Here or GET TVANTS Here
TVAnts is a Chinese streaming/broadcasting program that is generally a little more reliable than Sopcast, and that generally produces higher quality streams than Sopcast. But TVANTS has limited channels as opposed to Sopcast. For basketball games, however, TVAnts is an important program to have. All evidence available is that TVANTS is a safe and free download.

VEETLE BROADCASTS
Get VEETLE Here
Veetle is a US-based internet broadcasting system that appears to be a spyware and virus free download. Basketball broadcasts are not numerous to date, but they are often high quality, on average in fact the highest quality of all programs tried to date. Highly recommended for the quality alone, but hopefully the number of games shown on this system will increase in 2009-10.

UTORRENT TORRENT PROCESSING FOR COMPLETED GAMES
Get UTORRENT Here
This program is useful to be able to download and then watch videos of completed games using torrent sharing. It will not be of any help in watching live games. Many more completed NBA games are available via torrent than are available on Youtube or from direct downloads. This torrent program is known for it's reliability, efficiency, and low usage of computer resources. It is the only torrent program that we would recommend.

WARNINGS REGARDING TORRENTS
However, torrents are among the riskiest things you can do with a computer. It is easy for criminals, who by the way are never caught, to include spyware and very nasty viruses with torrent downloads. So using torrents is a risky proposition. Hoopz-1 itself does not generally use nor endorse the use of torrents.

HOW TO MAKE A BAD SOPCAST STREAM WATCHABLE

Many Sopcast streams are so poor that they are almost or completely unwatchable. You can make a bad Sopcast stream much better by playing the stream on a VLC media player. If you don't have VLC yet, there is a link above for it. There is also a link above for Sopcast if you do not have it yet.

Once you have both Sopcast and the VLC media player, the objective is to open a Sopcast stream of your choosing, and then make it much better quality by playing the stream in the VLC. Here are step by step instructions:

1. Using a link to a game from one of the web sources of such links to live games, open the Sopcast stream of the game.
2. Mute the sound and minimize the Sopcast window, but do not exit from the program, even after you have the stream running in VLC. You must simultaneiously stream in both Sopcast and VLC.
3. Open VLC, which will open in the form of a mini toolbar.
4. Click "file" on the mini toolbar, and then click "open network stream."
5. In the window that comes up, click the "network" tab.
6. Put a dot in the circle for "HTTP/HTTPS/FTP/MMS."
7. In the field labeled "URL" type or copy and paste the following:
127.0.0.1:8902
8. At the bottom right of the window, click "OK."
9. Now the game should play in the VLC media player, and the quality should be much better than it was in Sopcast if it was poor in Sopcast.
Aside from being your connection to live basketball, Hoopz 1 is also a good connection to downloads of basketball movies, both fiction and nonfiction basketball movies. The directory of sites for basketball movies is just below. Always remember that download codes are valid for only a limited and indefinite amount of time, so it's frequently use them quickly or lose them.

HOOPZ-1 ULTIMATE DIRECTORY OF SITES THAT HAVE BASKETBALL MOVIES
A site which features both fiction and non-fiction basketball movies

HOOPZ-1 POSTED PLAYOFF GAMES

COMPLETE PLAYOFF GAMES POSTED
We have posted Youtube videos of a few complete playoff games. So far, we have the following games posted:

--April 2008 Lakers-Nuggets Round One Playoff Series, Game 4 in 11 parts
--April 2008 Lakers-Nuggets Round One Playoff Series, Game 3, in 10 parts
--April 2008 Lakers-Nuggets Round One Playoff Series, Game 1, in 12 parts
--May 2008 Celtics-Cavaliers Round Three Playoff Series, Game 7, in 12 parts, but posted in a widget in a single post


Look for more completed playoff games to be posted in the weeks, months, and years again.

Blog Archive

COMPLETED GAMES AND BASKETBALL MOVIE DOWNLOADS>>>>>
For more, click "older posts," or use the archive above.

Monday, January 26, 2009

April 2008 Lakers-Nuggets Round One Playoff Series, Game Four, Part Eleven

April 2008 Lakers-Nuggets Round One Playoff Series, Game Four, Part Ten

April 2008 Lakers-Nuggets Round One Playoff Series, Game Four, Part Nine

April 2008 Lakers-Nuggets Round One Playoff Series, Game Four, Part Eight

April 2008 Lakers-Nuggets Round One Playoff Series, Game Four, Part Seven

April 2008 Lakers-Nuggets Round One Playoff Series, Game Four, Part Six

April 2008 Lakers-Nuggets Round One Playoff Series, Game Four, Part Five